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West Bloomfield (248) 538-6000 HERCULES FAMILY RESTAURANT 33292 West 12 Mile Farmington Hills (248) 489-9777 Serving whitefish, lamb shank, pastitsio and moussaka r min am mu ' mil gm I Receive 111 n o Off' efi 4/14 2000 102 Entire Bill not to go with any other offer I I with coupon I Expires 12/30/2000 i •-■e•ff =ism ••• I recently published Passover Haggada doesn't tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Instead, A Survivors' Haggadah (Jewish Publication Society; $50), written by a Holocaust survivor in Germany in 1945 and 1946 and republished this year, uses the lan- guage of the traditional Exodus story to talk about the Holocaust and the revival of Jewish life in displaced per- sons camps after World War II. The role of Pharaoh is played by Hitler, who "sets his hungry dogs at the babes of Israel." Some of the Jews, in their familiar role of victims, hand their children over to Christians — some of whom hide the Jews out of conviction; others do so for money and later "bring them out to be killed." The Allies exert the retribution exacted by God in the original Passover story, subjecting the Germans to 250 plagues. The displaced person camps are cel- ebrated for being the place where the shaarit haplayta, the saved remnant of European Jewry, began to rebuild. But the Haggada shines a critical light on the conflicts among competing groups in the D.P. camps: "And so it happens that the non-Orthodox snatch the children of the Orthodox, and the Orthodox snatch the children of the non-Orthodox." Yosef Dov Sheinson, a Holocaust survivor from Kovno, Lithuania, creat- ed the Haggada. Sheinson, a Hebrew teacher and Zionist before the war, survived the war in slave labor camps, including a sub-camp of Dachau. After the libera- tion, he left Theresienstadt, which by - that time was in Soviet hands, and crawled to a farmer's home. After a short stint in the Landsberg D.P. camp, Sheinson moved to a private house in Munich, where he worked on a Jewish newspaper. There he compiled this Hagadda, which was printed by a German publishing house in return for cigarettes and food rations. The traditional Four Questions are bordered with extra question marks, perhaps representing the underlying , questions of how the Holocaust could have been allowed to occur. Saul Touster, a retired professor of law at Brandeis University, discovered the Haggada in 1996, when he was cleaning out his late father's papers. The book was inscribed to his father, a longtime executive with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, who received it when he visited the camps in 1952. Touster decided to publish the Hagadda — he had it translated from Hebrew and Yiddish and compiled his own commentary — in part to honor his father. "In a way, my work in recovering this is a testimony to him and what he had done," says Touster, adding that he considers himself a Holocaust vic- tim who luckily survived by being born in the United States. Touster, who used the Haggada last year, admits that it changes the seder mood. "It's not about do-goodism. You go away feeling the experience. And it tempers your spirit," he says, recom- mending that it be used as a supple- ment to a more traditional Haggada. Each two pages of this Haggada are a couplet. The left side is a copy of the original Haggada; the right carries an English translation, plus commentary and selected readings. - With the help of 16 woodcuts creat- ed during the war by Hungarian sur- vivor Miklos Adler, the Haggada brings the burden of the Holocaust onto the relatively joyous Passover story. What comes through most clearly is Sheinson's struggle to find an answer to the questions of the existence of God and of Jewish survival in the wake of the Holocaust. The traditional Four Questions are bordered with extra question marks, which Touster interprets as represent- ing the underlying questions of how the Holocaust could have been allowed to occur. On another page, Sheinson included a fragment of the Torah that reads " Vehi emunateynu, or "This is our faith." Sheinson's answer appears to lie in Zionism. Indeed, much of the Haggada is framed as a Zionist polemic. The story of the Four Sons, like much of the Haggada, is reframed in Zionist terms. Each of the sons, who question why the Jews want to move to their own land, is told why the Jews should move to Palestine. For exam- ple, the Wise Son is told: "Who knows how long their charity and their protective arm shall be extended to us? A home and a country should not come out of the charity but by right." Despite these strong Zionist lean- ings, Sheinson never moved to Israel. In 1948 he moved to Montreal, where he worked in Hebrew education until he died in the mid-1990s. One of the most moving parts of the Haggada comes from one of Touster's commentaries. He notes that a survivor who attended a Munich seder recalled that when it came time to ask the Four Questions, traditional- ly asked by the youngest participant at the table, the seder participants began to weep because there were no chil- dren present. Then, the survivor recalls, one man began asking the first question. The rest of the survivors joined in. ❑